


Forgetting Isn't Healing

by pvtblithe



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Comfort, Gen, Healing, M/M, Therapy, post-war AU, therapist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 07:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21316402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvtblithe/pseuds/pvtblithe
Summary: After the war, Nixon and Winters both struggle to move on in different ways.Slightly inspired by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24





	Forgetting Isn't Healing

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic for BOB, hope you enjoy it!

"That's not the problem." Winters sighs.

"Then what is?" Nixon asks.

"I just need my privacy. It's my office. It's not that I don't want to spend time with you, it's that I just need a quiet space, a thinking space."

"You want a nothing space?"

"Yes." Winters nods solemnly.

Sharing an apartment would be hard for two men who get along perfectly, but Nixon and Winters have found that their daily routines are much different after the war.

Winters will sit in his office for hours, and Nixon doesn't even know what it is that he does. He never seems to write, or read, or even be looking at anything. The few times Nixon has caught a glimpse of him through a cracked door or had to interrupt him, Winters was just sitting. Staring straight ahead. He always had a completely blank look on his face.

Today was one of the days where Nixon interrupted him. He was going to ask Winters if he wanted to go out to lunch, but he was less than pleased to be brought out of his thought.

Nixon dealt with his problems much differently. Instead of sitting in silence, Nixon drank. Which isn't surprising to anyone who knew him. He wanted to go to bars, and clubs, and concerts. Anywhere loud and busy.

The nothing of silence was Winter's distraction and chaos was Nixon's.

It's not like they never got along, there were nights were they stayed up until dawn laughing. They both enjoyed walks in the park, and swimming was a favorite for them both.

But on hard days, and anniversaries, they couldn't stand to be next to each other. Instead of becoming each others crutch, they became each others downfall.

It hurt them, of course, but they also understood that everyone grieves and moves on in different ways.

They continued living this way for years. The whole apartment became silent. Winter's sense of nothing had slowly expanded from his office. It moved into his bedroom, then the bathroom, then the kitchen, and before Nixon knew it, the entire apartment was silent. Not even sounds from the outside seemed to dare penetrate the void.

Nixon was rarely home. He decided after a year of partying and getting himself more drunk then he has ever been, that it was time to move on. Well, move on wasn't the right word, but distract himself with something else.

Nixon poured himself into his work. He didn't actually care about work, but it gave him something to do 5 days a week. When he came home, he'd go right to bed, and would leave as soon as he woke up. Some days he would see Winters, sometimes not.

The good days became less and less, until they were as nonexistent as the apartment felt. There was no longer any communication, aside from a quiet goodbye that Nixon would hear from Winters most mornings.

Winters didn't celebrate Nixon's birthday or even his own. No holiday survived the nothingness.

Nixon tried, he really did. Tried to get Winters outside to parties or dinners or to see war buddies that came into town. Nixon had a long list of excuses for why Winter's wasn't around.

Eventually, Nixon stopped trying. He didn't respond to the goodbye, he ears didn't even register it. He would spend weekends at friends houses to avoid the apartment. The longer he spent in there, the more and more he felt himself becoming nothing too.

"Aw, fuck." Compton sighed. "I gotta get going."

"Where to?" Nixon asks. It was always nice to see old airborne buddies, and he didn't like their time to be cut short.

"Therapy." Compton replies.

"You... go to therapy?" Nixon wasn't trying to sound judgmental, he just didn't know anyone that would freely admit it.

"It helps."

"With... war... stuff?"

Compton nods "And other stuff."

"Not to hold you up, but do you think... Do you think Winters would benefit from it?"

"Well... I assumed since I haven't seen him in a long time that he might be in a rough spot, so why don't I give you my therapists card and you can talk to him yourself? I'm sure it will help Winters if you were there too, especially at first."

"Yeah, yeah... thanks" Nixon nods, and takes the card from Compton.

"I'll see you around."

Nixon walks into the apartment. He can already feel himself sinking. He tries to call out, but it's hard. He wants to scream until the noise stuffs the apartment so full it explodes.

He can't make himself do it. He walks from room to room, looking for Winters. He finds him in his office.

He looks towards the door as Nixon walks in, but he barely registers that he's actually there.

"Dick... buddy." Nixon whispers. It's as loud as he can make his voice.

Winters doesn't respond, but Nixon sees a bit of life come back into his eyes. The become a little bluer, and a little less gray.

"I made you lunch, then we've got somewhere to go."

Winters nods, which is more than Nixon expected from him.

As Nixon watches him stand up and walk to him, he realizes how much Winter's physique has changed. He seemed like a shell of the man he once was. He was skinny, almost worryingly so, and he needed a haircut and a shave. Orange strands of hair clung to his forehead and hung in front of his eyes, but Winters didn't move to sweep them away.

He knew Winters was eating, because the groceries would have to be restocked every weekend, but he didn't realize how sickly he began to look until now.

After Winters finished eating, Nixon tried again to start up a conversation. Winter's replies were so quiet and short that they barely registered as sounds to Nixon's ears.

Nixon gives up trying to have a back and forth conversation, and instead tells him about Compton and his therapist. He explained how he called them and got an appointment for them both.

Nixon was going to say it was for him and he wanted Winters there for help, but he knew even in this state Winters could see past his fib.

As they stepped out into the harshly cold air, Winters realized just how long it had been since he'd gone outside their apartment. He was able to take a big breath of air.

The noises flowed around Winters and all of the sights felt like a freight train. Sometimes he forgot their apartment was in a middle of a city, with thousands of people around him at any moment.

Nixon held his arm all the way to the therapists office. Winters thought it was for comfort, but really Nixon was afraid if he let go Winters would blow off with the wind. Find another quiet place to turn into nothing.

It wasn't long until they were in the therapists office. Luckily, it was only a couple blocks away from their apartment.

Nixon explained to the therapist his side of things, trying to convey every horrible thing they went through in the war in the shortest amount of time possible. It was then that Nixon realized little details became fuzzy. Like the name of that private that got killed in front of him, or the town where he saw a close friend of his dead. Of course, it had been years, and he drank to forget, but no matter how much he didn't want to, he could always remember everything. How the blood sprinkled red onto the snow. How the soldiers would cry out. How he would cry when no one else was around.

But now... the inaction ended up being what made him forget. He didn't realize he had said out loud about the guilt from his memory lapsing.

The therapist was about to respond when Winters said "I don't want to forget."

"Expand on that." The doctor said, turning his attention towards winters.

"I can't forget. Not any of them. They were my men, they were my friends. If I forget them..." Winters blinks back tears. Nixon realizes this is the first time he's seen him cry.

"If you forget them..." The therapist prompts.

"Then I'm doing a disservice to them. I'm disrespecting their honor. They gave up everything, their lives. If I forget, whose left to remember?"

The therapist nods. "Are you afraid of forgetting?"

"Everyday I run the details through my head. I can replay whole days like movies."

Nixon realizes that through all of the silence, Winters was reliving. Reliving every day of the war to remember what most veterans were trying desperately to forget.

"What's another way you can remember them? Something that doesn't burden you as much?" The doctor asks.

"I... I don't know. That's why I do this."

"Could you write them down? Document them so if anything becomes fuzzy, it's easy for you to remember?"

"Yeah... yeah." Winters nods. He never thought of himself as a good writer, but if it helped him out of the spiral he was currently in, it was worth a shot.

"I want you to come back next week with just one story. One man's story, or one day from the war. It doesn't have to be a novel, it could be a couple sentences. I want you to use the time that you would have spent thinking about that by doing something you enjoy. I trust that Nixon will hold you accountable."

And Nixon did. He let Winters go for a few days, he could hear the pencil scratching against the paper furiously. He was worried that Winters would use writing it down as another way to spiral.

When he got back to the apartment, it was lit up with music. It felt like a whole different home and he genuinely thought that he had entered the wrong apartment, until he saw Winters by the stove, cooking.

"Well isn't this a sight." Nixon chuckles.

Just as the nothingness had swept over the apartment, it was beginning to be pushed back. It began to feel alive again.

Winters still wasn't up for a lengthy chat and deep conversation, but Nixon was just happy to have him sitting across from him at the dining table. It nearly brought tears to his eyes.

"I finished." Winters says as they're cleaning up from a lovely dinner.

"Finished?" Nixon asks, rinsing off his plate in the sink.

"Writing. Just one day."

"Oh."

There was a moment of silence.

"Can you read it?"

Nixon sighs. The question is heavy. Winters asks if he can, but he knows it's more pleading than that.

"You have to understand... that not everybody wants to remember as much as you do. For some of us... it's painful. I'm okay forgetting some of the worst things."

"Ah." Winters nods. "I... understand."

It's a few days later and they head back to the therapist, and this time, Nixon waits in the lobby for Winters.

"Well... this is a lot of papers." The therapist chuckles, skimming them over.

"I feel like I need to do something more with them." Winters explains. "Because it's not just the dead in these pages, it's not just the bad. It's everything. Every laugh, and tear, and smile, and bullet."

"Remember why you started writing. To get yourself out of a dark place. You've made leaps and bounds in just one week, don't exhaust yourself." The therapist says. "But... since these were your men... you could try compiling everything about one man and sending it to their families? I'm sure some of them would deeply treasure it."

Winters takes this in stride, every week he finishes one story about one man and mails it off. He usually spends the first two days of the week writing, then two more for making his own copy, and the rest of the week he spends with Nixon. He even gets around to seeing his old buddies. In all of his effort not to forget about the departed, he forgot about the living.

After five weeks and five separate stories, Nixon decides to surprise Winters with a typewriter. It helps cut down on the writing time, and Winters no longer has sores rubbed into his already calloused hands from gripping a pencil too much.

It takes over a year of writing. Nixon helps him track down families addresses to send the letters to.

Nixon sometimes reads a brief paragraph of the letter, but nothing beyond that. He keeps telling himself that everyone grieves differently.

"Last story." Winters says, handing Nixon the most papers yet.

"Your own?"

"No... yours." Winters says, searching Nixon's face for some reaction.

Nixon closes his eyes for a second, processing everything, then hands it back. "I never read 'em, what makes you think I'm starting now?"

Winters pushes it into Nixon's hand. "You didn't need to read any of the other ones. This one you do."

Nixon leaves it on the dining room table, trying to show Winters his defiance, but it turns out all too tempting.

One night after Winters is fast asleep, Nixon gets out a bottle of whiskey and sits down. He reads the first page quickly. Its training, Curahee, Sobel, nothing too painful.

It doesn't stay that way. It tears Nixon apart to read it, but once he starts, he doesn't even pause to drink. It's his story tied in with Winters, after all, they've always been inseparable.

"Forgetting isn't healing. It isn't grieving." Winters says, making Nixon jump.

"Didn't know you were up." Nixon says, wiping away tears that he didn't even realize were falling.

"You helped me, and now its time that I help you." Winters explains.

Nixon knew he needed it, and he knew Winters was probably the only person who would understand.

"I'll get my copies." Winters says, going into his office and grabbing the neatly stacked papers.

Together, they read over the papers and talk about everything, focusing on the good. They were able to smile and laugh while talking about the war. Unlike so many who were forced to go through the battle alone, they had each other.

And they would always have each other.


End file.
